


Second Nature

by Deannie



Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Community: fic_promptly, M/M, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 05:13:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5484842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris is grimy. Ezra feels a need to take a bath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Nature

**Author's Note:**

  * For [randi2204](https://archiveofourown.org/users/randi2204/gifts).



> Randi wanted: "Magnificent Seven, Chris/Ezra, secrets were second nature for Ezra."

Secrets were second nature to Ezra Standish. He didn’t show himself to people often, having cultivated his persona so completely that there was no crack in it upon casual inspection. People knew nothing more of him than he wanted them to, which gave a man a certain freedom to observe without seeming to do so.

He sat at the poker table that had become his over the last six months, and took advantage of his God-given talents, stripping an over-eager and under-skilled young man of a fair amount of his ready cash. The boy could afford the loss by the look of him, and should be taught the lesson.

It took very little attention to teach the child, so Ezra let his thoughts and his gaze wander, both of them landing inevitably on the table at the far end of the bar, right up against a wall, with a clear view of the entire room. Chris Larabee sat there, Vin at his right hand, Buck at his left, a bottle of whiskey only barely touched before him. It was a good night.

> Chris had been at his cabin for the last few days and had rolled into town this morning while Ezra was taking his coffee on the porch in front of the saloon. Chris looked grimy and tired, and Ezra had breathed a sigh of relief to see him head straight from the livery to the bath house. That he himself chose to visit said establishment not too many minutes afterward was likely noticed by no one.
> 
> Ezra was good at secrets.
> 
> “Washing off the stink of the saloon, Ezra?” Chris had asked good-naturedly when Ezra entered the main bathing room. Chris was the only one there at the time, so his curtain was open as he enjoyed the view out the back of the building and into the desert.
> 
> “I do hope you are washing off the altogether different stink that heavy labor creates, Mr. Larabee,” he replied politely. “I do conduct much of my business in the saloon to which you are no doubt headed next.”
> 
> Chris smiled engagingly. “I warrant I’m not the worst thing you’ve smelled in that establishment,” he said, shamelessly scrubbing a cloth along his arm. His chest, smooth and firm, was streaked with dirt and became the next field of attack for the rag.
> 
> “You are sadly quite correct,” Ezra replied, demurely pulling his own curtain around his tub and ending the conversation without a hint of rudeness between them. Ezra liked to think he and Chris had come to an understanding after all these months, and Chris was never one for much talk anyway—certainly not while naked in a bathtub.
> 
> Ezra knew that Chris could only stand a bath for so long. He wasn’t an unclean man, but he needed to move. To be doing something. Ezra’s curtain, providentially, had a small rent in it, affording him a fine view of the other man’s quick but thorough ablutions. He considered Chris’s flank as the older man pulled himself out of the tub and began to towel off.
> 
> He had a scar on his left hip, like a whiplash. If it was like the lashes Ezra hid, it would be soft but uneven, raised and brutal and a part of him, soul and all. He wondered if running his fingers along the outside of it would raise goosebumps on Chris’s skin the way it did when someone did it to him. He wondered where Chris got it.
> 
> A bullet had plowed through Chris’s side at one point, Ezra noted, watching the play of a small soft towel as it wiped off the water covering Chris’s stomach and the fur above his crotch. Did it ache when the summer rains came? Would rubbing the scar ease that pain?
> 
> Chris didn’t wear underclothes—or at least not today. He shook out a pair of black cotton pants from his pack and slid them on, buttoning them carefully past a surprisingly furry set of nethers. Ezra wondered if the coarse fabric chafed. Would Chris revel in silk drawers, or would the feel of them be somehow wrong—too soft, too genteel?
> 
> Ezra held in a hiss of sympathy as Chris turned and reached down for his shirt. A huge dark bruise covered the back of his left shoulder, fresh and, by the hitch in Chris’s movements, painful. He’d dropped a timber on himself, probably, trying to finish the cabin roof on his own. Because Chris Larabee did everything on his own.
> 
> The seven of them were alike in that. It was amazing that they ever got anything done together, really.
> 
> And he’d been knifed in the back—or possibly bayoneted—sometime in the past. Lucky placement, between his lungs and his gut, far enough off to the side not to kill him.
> 
> Oh, the stories Chris had, Ezra was sure. He didn’t look down at the scars his own body carried. His secrets were his own.
> 
> And so, regrettably, were Chris’s.

“Hey, Mister?” A young, eager voice broke Ezra’s train of thought. “You gonna call or what?” Ezra focused on the naïve mark at his table, breaking contact with the table across the way.

Ezra looked at his hand. Full house, eights over queens. If he was right, the kid had at most a couple of pairs.

“My apologies, my young friend,” he said, looking at the pot and calculating before tossing in his money. This should just about clean the boy out. “My mind was elsewhere. I call, of course.”

“Pair of kings and a pair of nines!” the boy crowed. Like a naïf, he reached for the pot and Ezra had to put out a hand to stop him.

“It’s customary to allow a man to show his hand, son,” he said, flipping his own cards over and watching the boy’s face fall. And then turn predictably angry. Lord, why was it always his fault when they lost?

“I didn’t think you could have anything’d beat that!” the boy groused loudly. Ezra waited to be accused of cheating. The boy hadn’t looked armed when he came in, but Ezra didn’t always look it either. Surprisingly, the boy just sighed and opened his money fold to consider his remaining stake. “Guess I better quit while I still got something.”

Ezra grinned encouragingly. “You, my friend, have learned a lesson it takes some men lifetimes to learn.”

The boy smiled. “You sure are a great poker player. Maybe I’ll come through on my way back East and you can teach me a few of your secrets?”

Ezra looked over to Chris’s table to find all three men watching him with a tenseness about them that said the boy’s exclamation a moment ago was loud enough to raise suspicions. He met Chris’s eyes and nodded both his thanks and an all clear, and received a small, precious grin in response.

“Some secrets are meant to be kept, young man,” Ezra murmured, shaking the boy’s hand and sending him on his way.

He pocketed his winnings and went to the bar to get a whiskey, his mind playing over the scars and secrets writ across Chris’s lovely, naked skin. His own secret desire could stay just that.

After all, secrets were second nature to him, right?

*******  
the end


End file.
